mixing IDE and SATA hard drives on a FreeBSD system

Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC chad at shire.net
Wed May 4 15:08:07 PDT 2005


On May 4, 2005, at 3:27 PM, Andrew L. Gould wrote:

> On Wednesday 04 May 2005 03:25 pm, Chuck Robey wrote:
>
>> Andrew L. Gould wrote:
>>
>>> My AMD K6-2 computer is in the shop getting upgraded to AMD64.  If
>>> FreeBSD 5.4 is released next week, the timing couldn't be better.
>>>
>>> I was thinking about putting FreeBSD and swap on the ATA100 IDE
>>> hard drive and installing a SATA hard drive for home and database
>>> data.  Is there any reason I shouldn't mix hard drive types?  (I've
>>> never messed with SATA before.)
>>>
>>
>> YMMV, but for myself, I notice that SATA is notably less reliable
>> than straight SCSI drives are.  Less than Ide also.  I don't know
>> why.
>>
>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Andrew
>>>
>
> Thanks for the warning.  I just did a google search on "sata
> reliability" with lots of interesting results.  The expected lifespan
> (MTBF) of a sata is lower than the scsi; but I haven't found any
> comparisons to ide yet.
>

they should be the same as IDE as almost all the SATA drives use the  
same mechanisms as their comparable IDE brethren.  SATA is just the  
interface.  SCSI drives are different in that the market for the SCSI  
interface also demands a different mechanism.  They could, if they  
wanted to (and used to) add SCSI interfaces to the same mechanisms as  
the IDE mechanisms and you'd have a lower SCSI MTBF

Chad




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